In the area of communication networks, substantial resources are committed to designing communication standards (i.e., sets of protocols for performing acts such as representing data, signaling, authenticating, and detecting errors, which are required to send information over a communication channel). These standards are generally engineered with a particular set of emerging applications in mind, and are optimized to perform well under a relatively narrow range of conditions (e.g., distance, interference, etc.). Often, trade-offs are made in the design of a standard in order to minimize the cost of implementing the standard within commodity hardware devices and minimize the number of variants of the standard to ensure device compatibility. Such trade-offs usually have the effect of further limiting the range of conditions within which a given standard is applicable.
The challenges mentioned above are commonly faced by consortia of manufacturers and other organizations endeavoring to design useful communication standards. The result is a rich landscape of standards, each of which is typically applicable only in relatively narrow conditions as needed by a particular set of applications. Though a large set of standards have now been developed, new ones are constantly being introduced. While some standards are improvements over older versions, justified by a rapid decrease in hardware cost, others are developed to support entirely new emerging applications.
It is likely that a trend will continue to emerge toward the development of a greater quantity of specialized, narrowly applicable communication standards. While such a trend does produce a great number of established standards from which a manufacturer wishing to develop a communication device might choose, it also increases the number of standards that infrastructure devices (e.g., communication servers, wireless access points, etc.) must simultaneously support without necessarily doing anything to improve the device's operational range and ability to adapt to varying conditions.